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The UFO Controversy in America

[Hardback]

by David M. Jacobs(foreword by J. Allen
Hynek)

In a field with more than its fair share of unsubstantiated
claims and fantasists it is rare to find a sound,
impartial and thorough academic work on the subject
of UFOs which has stood the test of time.

"The Unidentified Flying Objects Controversy
in America" was David Jacobs' doctoral thesis
written in 1974-75 and later expanded for publication
as this book by Indiana University Press. It is
unusual to find a comprehensive examination of
the UFO phenomenon written by an academic historian
using the relevant methodology, which does not
stray into speculation but sticks to facts: official
reports, press reports, government actions, public
advocacy, documents, records, testimony. As academic
history it's hard to fault and has probably never
been equalled as an examination of the UFO phenomenon
and the way it was managed by the government, military,
intelligence services and mass media in the USA
up to 1975.

Critical
Reviews:

Starting with the still unexplained and anomalous "airship" sightings
in 1896 and 1897, widely reported in the press at that
time, Dr. Jacobs moves on through the 20th century,
examining in turn the various phases the phenomenon
went through - often defined as much by the strategy
of the government and their agencies in managing the
problem as by the manifestation of sightings and reports.
Above all, there has always been a controversy, and
considerable resources appear to have been devoted
to managing it. The late 1940s, the 1952 wave, the
Robertson Panel, the early contactees and their claims,
the rise of NICAP and the battle for congressional
hearings, the Hynek/McDonald/Menzel confrontations
of the 1960s, Blue Book, the Condon Committee and its
aftermath are all examined in enlightening and refreshingly
non-partisan detail.

Dr. Jacobs' concluding chapter, "1973: Echoes
of the Past" gives the reader a good contemporary
view of the way the subject of unidentified flying
objects was managed in the USA by the media including
the national press, far more important then as an opinion-former
than in our current internet age, and in the emerging
mass media age of television. Although the Hill case
had by then emerged into the public eye and was being
examined on national TV by journalist/writer John Fuller
(related in the book by Jacobs), there was at that
time little knowledge about the alien abduction phenomenon
and the level of public and academic discourse about
the UFO issue in general had not really moved on since
the mid-1950s.

Jacobs' detailed and impartial examination of all
the main players in the controversy during this period
is everything you might expect from top-level academia.
He is as fair-minded as possible and betrays no bias,
whether dealing with debunkers like Klass and Menzel
or with the more outrageous claims of the "space
brothers are coming to save us" contactees.

The book concludes with 36 pages of referenced notes,
a bibliography of more than 200 other books and papers
and a good index.

--
The Guardian

April
25, 2010

Customer
Reviews:

5.0
out of 5 stars! A scholarly, fair-minded history of the
UFO phenomenon.

Most
UFO books tend to be written by "pro-UFO" believers
who focus on the wilder aspects of the phenomenon (alien
abductions, government coverups, etc.), or by so-called "skeptics" who
are often more interested in ridiculing obviously flawed
UFO sightings and witnesses than in honestly trying to
solve the more baffling cases. Furthermore, few UFO books
try to focus on the phenomenon as an historical or social
event in American history, and as a result, the UFO phenomenon
often comes across as a disjointed and disconnected series
of sightings, abductions, and bizarre events.

David Jacobs,
currently a professor of history at Temple University,
attempted to correct these mistakes in 1975 when he wrote "The
UFO Controversy in America". This book, which has
become a valuable research tool for both believers and
skeptics alike, is by far one of the best books ever
written on the UFO phenomenon. This is NOT a poorly researched, "wild-eyed" book
done by a UFO "believer", nor is it a "hatchet
job" done
by an obvious debunker. Instead, it is a well-written,
well-researched, and largely fair-minded look at UFOs
as an historical phenomenon.

Dr. Jacobs begins by looking
at how the UFO phenomenon started in June 1947 with the
well-publicized sighting by Kenneth Arnold of nine "flying
saucers" flying in formation near Mt. Rainier in
Washington State. He goes on to describe how the US Air
Force and military became interested in UFOs and he
gives a detailed account of the Air Force's top-secret
investigations into the UFO "problem", which
began with Project Sign in 1947, and then went through
Project Grudge from 1949-1952 and Project Blue Book from
1952-1969.

He gives an excellent account of the controversial "Condon
Committee", which was a government-funded UFO research
project at the University of Colorado in the late sixties.
Although both UFO believers and skeptics started out
with high hopes that the project would provide a "solution" to
the UFO mystery, it quickly became bogged down in a nasty
feud between those scientists and researchers who took
UFOs seriously, and those who did not – including the
project's leaders, Dr. Edward Condon and his top assistant,
Robert Low. When Dr. Condon made several public remarks
ridiculing UFO witnesses and it was discovered that Low
had written a letter detailing how the Condon committee
would pretend publicly to be "unbiased" about
UFOs while it actually was "anti-UFO" in private,
several of the committee's "pro-UFO" members
quit in disgust and became openly critical of the project's
leadership.

In fact, the "Condon Report" (published
in 1969) couldn't find explanations for nearly one-third
of the sightings it examined, yet Condon, in his introduction
to the report, flatly stated that UFOs didn't exist
and that science had nothing to gain from taking the
phenomenon seriously. He, thereafter, became a fierce
opponent of any attempt to treat UFOs seriously, and
even tried to shut down a symposium on UFOs sponsored
in 1969 by the prestigious American Academy for the Advancement
of Science.

Jacobs also offers a full account of almost
every major UFO sighting from the Arnold incident in
1947 through the 1973 UFO "wave" (which was
the last well-publicized series of sightings in US history).
Unlike most books on UFOs, Jacobs attempts to be even-handed
in his analysis of the subject, and he is critical of
both the believers and debunkers at times.

The one feature
of this book which may surprise some people is that it
ignores the famed "Roswell" UFO case, in which
a UFO supposedly crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New
Mexico in 1947. In fact, the Roswell case was virtually
unknown until the 1980s, and it was the Kenneth Arnold
sighting, and not Roswell, which brought UFOs into the
spotlight.

If you're interested in reading a scholarly,
well-researched and well-written history of the UFO phenomenon
– the sightings, government investigations, and the people
who make up both sides of this mystery – then David Jacob's
book is one of the best that's been published. My only
complaint is that it ends in the mid-1970s – I wish
that Dr. Jacobs would give us an updated version soon.
Highly recommended!